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Books : Proust Was a Neuroscientist |
List Price: $24.00Amazon.com's Price: $16.32 You Save: $7.68 (32%)Prices subject to change.
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 700.105
EAN: 9780618620104
ISBN: 0618620109
Label: Houghton Mifflin
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: November 01, 2007
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Studio: Houghton Mifflin
Sales Rank: 56419
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
In this technology-driven age, it's tempting to believe that science can solve every mystery. After all, science has cured countless diseases and even sent humans into space. But as Jonah Lehrer argues in this sparkling debut, science is not the only path to knowledge. In fact, when it comes to understanding the brain, art got there first.
Taking a group of artists — a painter, a poet, a chef, a composer, and a handful of novelists — Lehrer shows how each one discovered an essential truth about the mind that science is only now rediscovering. We learn, for example, how Proust first revealed the fallibility of memory; how George Eliot discovered the brain's malleability; how the French chef Escoffier discovered umami (the fifth taste); how Cézanne worked out the subtleties of vision; and how Gertrude Stein exposed the deep structure of language — a full half-century before the work of Noam Chomsky and other linguists. It's the ultimate tale of art trumping science.
More broadly, Lehrer shows that there's a cost to reducing everything to atoms and acronyms and genes. Measurement is not the same as understanding, and art knows this better than science does. An ingenious blend of biography, criticism, and first-rate science writing, Proust Was a Neuroscientist urges science and art to listen more closely to each other, for willing minds can combine the best of both, to brilliant effect.
Amazon.com Review:
Amazon Significant Seven, December 2007: Proust may have been more neurasthenic than neuroscientist, but Jonah Lehrer argues in Proust Was a Neuroscientist that he (and many of his fellow artists) made discoveries about the brain that it took science decades to catch up with (in Proust's case, that memory is a process, not a repository). Lehrer weaves back and forth between art and science in eight graceful portraits of artists (mostly writers, along with a chef, a painter, and a composer) who understood, better at times than atomizing scientists, that truth can begin with "what reality feels like." Sometimes it's the art that's most evocative in his tales, sometimes the science: Lehrer writes about them with equal ease and clarity, and with a youthful confidence that art and science, long divided, may yet be reconciled. --Tom Nissley
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
Serious thinkers about what it means to be human should rejoice that Jonah Lehrer freed himself from the confines of the neuroscience lab and found time to create this synthesis of science and arts. "Proust Was a Neuroscientist" is the most intelligent piece of writing I've come across in a very long time. Read it. It will not only exercise your analytical skills, but it will also help you pull the fragments of your perceptions into a more coherent whole. I look forward to further insights in the ... Read More
Rating:  -
At the end of this book the author admits that he's not a very good scientific researcher.
With all due respect I think his observation is borne out by much of this book which cherry picks from early artists to support the idea that 19th century artists predicted the advent of neuroscience.
In the case of Escoffier (which probably should've been made into a full book in its own right), the thesis is well supported: until Escoffier both recieved and contemporary thinking ... Read More
Rating: -
Superb insights into how artists and writers observed insights into human nature, personality, freedom and natural law before and over and against what science in their time believed. How truth is glimpsed through art.
Rating: -
Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer attempts to reveal ideas from artists about the mind that neuroscience is recently discovering as true. Lehrer explains both the artistic and scientific concepts in such a way that anyone could understand. This novel is not a hardcore lesson in neuroscience or art but instead a decent blend of both fields.
The different chapters look at a poet, four novelists, a chef, a painter, and a composer. The chapters each follow similar patterns. Lehrer ... Read More
Rating: -
This book reveals the inventive, entertaining and original perspective of a very talented young man. No, dear huffy-puppies -- and you know who you are -- who are so terribly incensed that someone would try to convince the world that Proust was a neuroscientist and, gosh, we who are so smart and well-read are compelled to pick holes in the premise of this book, why on earth would you, or anyone with half a brain, take its title seriously? Mr. Lehrer obviously took a proposition, i.e., artistic inspiration, ... Read More
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